Buying an Expired Domain

There are a few reasons you might want to purchase an expired, or expiring domain. The first and most obvious is because if you do it right, you’ll end up with a domain that already has history and a backlink profile. As an SEO professional, that has a lot of meaning but if you’re just trying spin up a new site as a business owner, you may not appreciate how powerful that can be.

This might sound very Black Hat-ish, but I assure you it’s not. Ok, ok, it certainly can be (and in reality, is usually is) but there is a perfectly good reason that it might not be Black Hat to do this. The “White Hat” thought process is that you buy a domain with history because you are spinning up a new website in the same niche that the expired domain is in and the content on your new site will be relevant and interesting to anybody that visited the expired site.

So if your new site is about Dog Training, you wouldn’t want to buy an expired domain that was about phototography as the backlinks that you intend to take advantage of have very little relevance to your new website.

In the below video, I show you how to find topical expired domains. The example in the video is a search for a health related domain and we look through a few bad ones before we finish with a decent one. You’ll want to run it full screen(it starts a little blurry so give it a few seconds and it’ll clear up).

In the above video, there are four things that should be pointed out.

To purchase domains from GoDaddy, you have to sign up. The cost is about $5.00/year so it’s negligible and opens up a whole world of expired domains. There are other places to purchase expired domains as well. Google is your friend here – look ’em up!

In the video, you’ll see and hear reference to the Moz toolbar. This is what allows me to so easily see the domain authority, trust flow, content flow etc. You can find the main toolbar here.

There is also a plug-in that allows you to see these metrics within the GoDaddy auction site. That can be added by googling “Domain Auction Metrics by DomCop”. With chrome it’ll be an addon from the chrome store (free). Just google that search term and click on the appropriate link depending on what browser you’re using.

The video also shows me researching the domain in Majestic SEO’s interface. This is a paid service although you can get some research done for free.

Ok, I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have questions or maybe some suggestions for follow up posts.